Min

Summary

Min is the Egyptian god of fertility and procreation, and protector of the desert and of foreign lands, above all the Eastern Desert, whose road runs from Koptos into the Wadi Hammamat with its quarries and gold mines. He is shown as a standing mummy with an erect phallus, one arm raised holding a flail, a crown of two feathers on a band whose end hangs down his back, and tall lettuce plants behind him. His two great cities were Koptos and Akhmim, so he is "Min of Koptos" and "Min, lord of Akhmim", and his emblem, which already appears on predynastic pottery, was the emblem of the Akhmim nome. Wherever renewal, fertility and male potency are at stake, Min is present, and his rites were part of the king's coronation and of the Sed festival in which the king's strength was renewed.

His oldest images are three large sandstone statues that Petrie found in 1894 in the foundations of the Ptolemaic temple at Koptos, the "Coptos colossi", which may be the earliest known representations of Min. Each is a naked standing man, his right hand clenched at his side and his left hand holding his phallus, which is lost though its socket remains. On the hanging end of the belt Min's emblem is carved twice, with two shells and a couchant lion, and on the third statue an elephant, a bull and a lion. Two are now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the third in Cairo.

Min has no long story in the papyri; his story is his festival. The Palermo Stone of the mid Fifth Dynasty names a festival called "the Birth of Min", or "the making of Min's statue", which may be the festival later called "the Coming Forth of Min", held at the new moon of Pakhon, the first month of the harvest season. The fullest record of it is in the reliefs of the temples of Ramesses II (the Ramesseum) and Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. At dawn on the day of the new moon a procession went from the palace to the temple, and the priests brought out Min's statue and carried it to a place called "the stairway", a stepped platform standing for the first hill or the garden. In the evening the statue was set on the platform, and the king went in to make the offering and cut a sheaf of grain, then walked around the place. At dawn on the second day a pole supporting the shrine was raised, and then came the rites of the king's coronation: he shot four arrows towards the four quarters of the world and released four birds. In the Medinet Habu procession a white bull walks before the king, and an Old Kingdom title is "custodian of the white bull".

One of Min's titles is Kamutef, "bull of his mother": in the title he is both his mother's son and her male, who makes her fruitful and is born of her. In the New Kingdom Min was regarded as a form of Amun, and the Bentresh Stela describes Ramesses as Amun's son, "begotten by Kamutef". In the Middle Kingdom Min was joined with Horus through his link with kingship, and so could be counted the son of Isis; in another triad he is her husband and Horus their son.

The idea Min turns on is that life passes on through seed. The bull who is his mother's son and her male, the festival at which the first harvest is cut and the king renewed, the lettuce whose white sap the Egyptians saw as a man's seed: all are images of one thing, that from the one comes what takes its place, from the father a son, from the crop a crop, from the king a king.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Mnw: m, n and w. The project's Egyptian essay reads it from mayn or manada, and says the root may come from a word meaning manhood and strength. The Arabic root that keeps m, n and w with the sense of manhood is manā / manū: the dictionaries give maniyy as "the water from which the child comes", with the verbs amnā and manā, and the Qur'an says: "Was he not a drop of maniyy emitted?" So Min, on this reading proposed on the method, is al-maniyy, the seed, which is what his images make him: the god who holds his phallus in his oldest statues, the bull of his mother, the lord of the lettuce whose sap was likened to a man's seed.

Linguistic Root

Al-maniyy

The Egyptian essay reads the name from mayn, which it glosses "who, which", or from manada, which it glosses "to raise, rise"; it calls Min the god of fertility, procreation and male strength, says that mayn may come from a word meaning manhood and strength and that manada reflects the raising of desire, and grades the reading "medium".

Neither reading rests on a dictionary sense: "who" and "which" are particles, and the essay gives no witness for manada. The sense the essay is looking for, manhood, is carried by another root whose letters are those of the Egyptian name, m, n and w. In al-Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād's al-Muḥīṭ fī l-Lugha, under "manā and manū": "maniyy is the water from which the child comes; the verbs are amnaytu and manaytu"; "munya is maniyy, and the water of the child in the afterbirth"; and "the munya of a she-camel is her days after the stallion covers her, up to ten days, in which her conception is ascertained". The Qur'an says: "Was he not a drop of maniyy emitted?" and "from a drop when it is emitted". Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī makes manā "to measure out, decree", and says maniyy is so called as "that by which living beings are measured out".

The letters are in place: m is m, n is n, and the Egyptian w is the w of manū, the Arabic root being written with both w and y. This is the same root from which the name of the northern moon, Máni, is read in the sense "to measure out", and al-Rāghib joins the two senses: seed is what living things are measured out from, and the moon is what time is measured by.

Egyptian itself has a verb mnsꜣ, "to ejaculate", in the Coffin Texts, and a noun of the same sense in the Edwin Smith medical papyrus, where the physician describes a man whose neck vertebra is dislocated, whose member is erect and discharging. Its first two letters are m and n. Whether the s and ꜣ after them belong to the root or are added to it is not known, so it brings the reading closer without settling it.

The limit of this reading is that Egypt's usual word for a man's seed is another, ꜥꜣꜥ, that the meaning of Min's name is unknown to Egyptologists, and that mnw has other senses in the Egyptian dictionary. So the reading is proposed on the method; letters and image meet in it, and the Egyptian verb brings it closer without settling it.

Key Mythic Narratives

The lettuce

The Global Egyptian Museum says Min is often shown with tall lettuce plants, standing in a field divided into plots that the Egyptians themselves later read as an offering table; that he was linked with lettuce from the late Old Kingdom on; and that a connection has been suggested between the white sap of the plant and human sperm. In The Contendings of Horus and Seth Isis collects her son Horus's semen in a pot, goes to Seth's garden and asks the gardener what plants Seth eats there. "The only plant Seth eats here with me is lettuce," he says. She puts Horus's semen on the lettuces, Seth eats them as usual, and becomes pregnant with the semen of Horus. In the story the lettuce is the seed's way into the body, as it is in Min's images.

Min and Pan

The Greeks identified Min with their Pan and called Akhmim "Panopolis", the city of Pan. Diodorus Siculus says that Pan is held in special honour by the Egyptians, who set up his statues in every temple and named a city after him in the Thebaid, called by the natives "Chemmo", which means City of Pan. Strabo describes Panopolis as an old settlement of linen-workers and stone-workers.

Min's chapel at Akhmim

The Global Egyptian Museum says Akhmim was a large city whose temple stones were taken in the fourteenth century CE to build houses in the villages around it; on its north-east side survives a rock-cut chapel of Min, probably cut under Thutmose III, decorated under Ay and restored under Ptolemy II.

Symbolic Reading

The Egyptian rereading essay makes all of Egypt's myths turn on the Nile: the flood is creation, its retreat the appearance of the land, the drought the death of Osiris, the new flood his rising again. Min's festival falls at the start of the harvest season, when the water has gone down and the grain is ripe, and the king cuts the first sheaf.

Mironova says the meaning of the festival was the renewal of the king's authority and power, which made it close to the Sed festival, and that its symbols were also connected with the sun's daily voyage, setting in the west and reborn at sunrise, and with death and resurrection in the afterlife, linking it with the Osiris festivals of the month of Khoiak. The new moon at which the festival begins, the first sheaf and the king crowned anew are all beginnings that come out of endings.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

On a limestone stela in the British Museum, from Deir el-Medina in the Nineteenth Dynasty, the goddess Qadesh stands between Min and the Canaanite Reshep, and below them the stela's owner Qeh, a necropolis foreman, with his wife and son worships Anat. The Egyptian god of fertility stands on one stela with two gods of Canaan.

Min's festival at the start of the harvest belongs to the agricultural calendar: the king cuts the first sheaf at the new moon of the harvest month. The festival begins with the new moon in the month that bears the name of Khonsu, the moon.

In the New Kingdom Min was regarded as a form of Amun, and the Egyptian dictionary knows the name "Min-Amun".